Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis

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gaze, the eyes of the ashen desert, which I know so well now. At the time it occurred to me that it was a hallucination, a brief nightmare that hadn’t appeared from without, but had emerged from within me. That gaze destroyed space; it seized everything for itself (it seemed that with her gigantic eye sockets she would suck in me, and the armchair, and the entire room). It seemed as if narrow cones of pale light, two steely barbs, emerged from her eyes. I flinched as if I had awoken during the night and felt cockroaches crawling on my face. I lifted my eyes, and Lord, I believed I was imagining things. I was caressed by the glossy black velvet eyes of a beauty begging me to approach. And breasts. Gedis peeled the pale blue lace from her shoulders and, stunned, looked at two dreamy hemispheres with dark, erect, brown nipples. “Oh Lord, Vytas, do you see?” I saw; I stared there as if entranced. Breasts strikingly inclined to the sides; each one swayed entirely separately, you could put a palm between them. I had already seen these breasts, as white as the ivory figurines in my father’s study.

      Only the nipples are dark brown. And you are red, blood rushes to your entire face. It’s red as well, it protrudes from below, and you are even more ashamed because she’s looking there too.

      “Come on, come on, don’t be afraid,” say her voluptuous swollen lips, “It’ll be nice, really nice in a minute.”

      Janė sits on the cot, leaning against the wall, bent legs spread a bit, and smiles gently. There are boxes and pieces of lumber thrown about the shed and colorful rags hung from the hooks under the ceiling. The cot by the window is hard; your knees even hurt, but you kneel, anyway. Janė smiles encouragingly; her teeth are white, white. She’s white all over, only her nipples are dark brown, and the hair below her belly. You look there and you feel faint. You’ve tried so many times to penetrate there, through the clothes, with your stare, and you would die, die, die. Now you see, and your head spins, and it’s awful. With her clothes off, she looks thinner; her legs have grown even longer. And she keeps looking at it.

      “That’s an unusual little beast you’re growing. How old are you, anyway, fourteen? My, what an early little gent you are . . .”

      You tremble when she touches it; it seems she’ll burn her hand—it’s so hot there. Her breasts are acutely inclined to the sides; you could put a palm between them. Janė lies on her side, pulls you down with her, not letting it out of her hands. She smells of bitter herbs and the steam of the kitchen. You throw back your head to catch your breath, and suddenly your heart stops. Outside the shed’s window floats a man’s head. He’s looking at you. Looking straight into your eyes and chewing a yellowish blade of grass. You want to run away, to escape, but she holds you firmly in her embrace and doesn’t let go. Don’t be afraid, little gent, she whispers, don’t be afraid. Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t see anything. And the man is still looking; he’s spat out the grass. You want to tell her, but you can’t catch your breath. You want to vanish into the earth, but you’re tied down: it’s tied down, it’s disappeared inside her. You want to die, you want it to break off, so you could run away. The man looks, his eyes huge. She gently lies on top on you, she’s going at it from above, breathing heavily. And it’s doing something inside of her, chomping and shuddering, extended like never before. Now it has become part of her. Janė has completely turned into it; she writhes and wriggles without your consent. The man’s head licks its lips, swallows its saliva. He’s looking straight into your eyes, as if he wants to suck in all of your insides, all your blood, all your brains, leaving only an empty skin . . .

      Completely stupefied, Gediminas carried her out in his arms. Without a sound she invited me, begged me, to come along. But I remained in the room, remained alone with breasts inclined to the sides, these and the others. And with her second gaze. No, the gaze didn’t re-materialize; rather I seemed to imagine those dreamy breasts, black hair, long legs, and slightly wry smile. Perhaps everything about her was invented; however, the barbed gaze was real. I remembered it—no, not that; something nameless, perhaps even senseless: the gray emptiness of the abyss, an obscure picture, an invisible light. People are accustomed to ignoring indistinct accumulations of memory like that. They are horrendously mistaken.

      The most important episodes in life aren’t lit up by the rays of the sun; fate does its dreary work in twilight, in a murderous clarity, in a sooty dusk—out of it, bats come flying; the eyes of meaningless nonexistence lurk within it. Our fate is measured out there, where owls hoot gloomily. Only the gray, dirty pigeons of Vilnius escape it into the light of day.

      I felt the black-haired woman’s second gaze spreading through the room like an invisible will-o’-the-wisp. In vain, I tried to hide from it. I drank the cognac left on the table and looked around with growing suspicion. I had been led into an invisible labyrinth where roving eyes followed me from its identical corridors. Her second gaze reminded me of my mother’s gaze as she stroked my head, of the grim stare of the camp barracks’s broken windows, of the stare of the colorless river pool—numerous spines piercing straight through, but most significantly—it reminded me of eyes I had never seen before. It reminded me of the narrow little snouts of rats and dilated pupils. Reminded me of reddish foam on painfully compressed lips, of the eyes of the yellowish, vine-entangled old house. I didn’t try to understand anything, otherwise I would have run out of Gedis’s room, to wherever my feet took me. A person who starts remembering the future shouldn’t expect anything good of it. But I still didn’t know my “future,” I hadn’t realized that only the one huge ALL exists. I was blind, I was a headless stuffed dummy, a doll drowsing on a bed of dreamy breasts; no signals could arouse me. I swigged cognac and stared moronically at the window. No, not out the window—there were neither buildings nor lights outside it, Gedis’s windows looked out straight into the void. Perhaps that was why frightening memories slowly encompassed me. A strange presentiment would flow over me in gusts and then retreat, the way a headache sometimes momentarily comes and goes again. I looked around at Gedis’s pedantically arranged living room; I even counted the leaves of a spreading, flowerless plant. It seems to me that this counting determined everything.

      The memory stood in front of my eyes like a large, old painting. Only the dust needed to be brushed off. It was hidden in between the real things, inside them themselves, in the ghostly forms of Gedis’s living room, quietly playing a melody heard once upon a time: the melody of some other room, some other space.

      On the right a mahogany dresser, submerged in an indistinct sha­dow, some other gloomy low furniture. On the left, a mirror and a wall with torn wallpaper. A pale-colored runner on the floor and a window—most significant of all—a window, outside which yawns a gray void. It’s dim in the room, but it’s brighter there than it is on the other side of the grimy glass; through it, the interior is lit up by the darkness, by the drab rays of the pallid sun. Just exactly that: the darkness lights up the dimness; the blackish rays suck the last remains of the day out of the room. This picture didn’t so much as breathe; it cowered in a boundless silence, grimly waiting for me to guess its secret. On the right an old dresser and some other low furniture . . . on the left a mirror, a full-sized mirror with a carved frame; an empty glass left by father . . . And all of it is looking at you. All of it is looking at you. Looking without eyes. There are no eyes in the picture; there is nothing that would remind you of eyes, nothing that would even let you think of eyes. There’s nothing there; however, the picture stubbornly, annoyingly, is looking at you with the biting stare of the spiritless void. The stare of a maw entangled in yellowish vines. I do not remember who saved me from it at other times.

      That evening Gediminas did the saving. He crept into the room like a thief, or perhaps like the victim of a theft—he kept glancing backwards, as if an apparition were following him. I didn’t recognize him. I couldn’t believe that indistinctly babbling figure with sunken eyes was The Great Gedis. It was some other person, frightened and enfeebled. No stray dog would rub up against a person like that. I didn’t recognize Gediminas. Someone else looked at me with a stare full of horror: “Go on, go on in yourself, you’ll see.” Lost between the dreamy breasts and the barbed eyes, everything seemed clear and inevitable. I had to get up and go into the bedroom. There I had to slowly undress and feel a strange, damp warmth rising from the bed. As if from a heap of rotting leaves. Only the smell, sugary and voluptuous, was different, entirely different. Everything was ordinary and inevitable, like the grass turning green in the spring, like

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